I’ve been surviving here long enough that envy feels like a luxury item I can’t afford.
The troops keep firing.
Their rifles discharge in clean bursts, rhythmically, as if the slaughter has a tempo. No wasted shots. No tantrums. No dramatic pauses. They’re cutting bodies down like they’re clearing a field.
And still—silence.
No Vakutan war cries.
No audible commands, either.
They’re either running on helmet-linked comms or they don’t need to talk because they’ve rehearsed this.
Which makes my scales crawl.
Because rehearsed violence means premeditated violence.
And premeditated violence means somebody decided, somewhere, that a certain number of deaths were acceptable collateral for whatever they’re trying to buy.
I lean back against the rock and close my eyes for half a heartbeat, letting my senses sharpen.
Wind—steady, harsh, carrying dust and the faint chemical stink of the ration vents that drift out into wilderness on certain days. Heat—radiating from stone under my forearms. Sound—distant discharge, thuds, the soft metallic chatter of something collapsing inside the station. Smell—ozone, copper, smoke. Taste—bitter air and old anger.
I open my eyes again.
And that’s when I see her.
At first, she’s just motion at the edge of the chaos—a smaller figure on an upper catwalk, briefly outlined against the atrium’s white light before the station’s emergency red strobes turn her into a silhouette. Human-sized. Quick. Moving like someonewho knows where she’s going, not like someone just running blind.
Then she disappears from the catwalk and reappears at a service hatch—an access point I’ve watched before, a route that leads into the maintenance shafts and out through the side vents that dump into wilderness.
No inmate uses those vents. They don’t know they exist, and even if they did, most are too fogged by rations to plan.
But a tech would.
A contractor would.
I squint, tracking her as she emerges from the side of the station, dropping to the ground and sprinting away from the kill lanes, angling not toward the prisoners but toward the wilderness like she understands the station is already dead.
Her movement has a sharpness to it—fear, yes, but not the sloppy kind. Focused fear. The kind that makes you fast and smart instead of loud and doomed.
I watch her for three seconds, four, five, and in those seconds I do the quick math my life has taught me to do.
A human tech out here is either bait, asset, or disaster.
If she’s bait, the troops will let her run long enough for her to draw something—or someone—out of hiding.
If she’s an asset, she’s carrying something. Data. Evidence. A key. Something worth killing a station’s crew to retrieve.
If she’s a disaster, she’s just a scared civilian about to stumble into the wilderness and get eaten alive by the first inmate she meets—or worse, the things that aren’t inmates.
She runs hard, boots kicking up dust, hair pulled back, posture forward like she’s trying to outrun the moon itself. Even from this distance I can see the way her head keeps snapping to the side, checking angles, reading terrain.
Not helpless.
Not stupid.
My mouth tightens.
